Theory and Practice in Activism

There’s a common confusion, often pushed by well-meaning #fashernistas, about how change actually happens. They love theory. They love to talk about change. But when it comes to doing, things go sideways. Why? Because good horizontalists know: theory must emerge from practice, not the other way around.

At the root of radical practice is #DIY culture. We don’t wait for perfect theory or academic approval. We get our hands dirty. We try things, we fail, we try again. Through this, we build theory that is grounded in reality, not floating above it.

The Problem with Top-Down Theory is that when you start from theory alone, disconnected from lived experience, you go ground and round in abstract circles. Then, inevitably, someone tries to apply this neatly wrapped theoretical package as a “solution” to the mess we’re in… and it breaks everything.

At best, this leads to another layer of #techshit to compost. At worst, it becomes academic wank, beautifully phrased but practically useless, imposed on grassroots organisers trying to get real work done.

We’re tired of clearing up after these failed interventions. Focus matters. Resources are scarce. Energy is precious. The practice-first approach, is why we’re doing something different with projects like:

#OMN (Open Media Network): building tools from the bottom up, with open metadata flows and radical trust.

#Indymediaback: rebooting a proven model of grassroots publishing that worked, updated for today.

#OGB (Open Governance Body): prototyping governance based on lived collaboration, not abstract debate.

All of this is theory grown from practice. None of it came from think tanks or grant-funded consultants. It came from kitchens, camps, squats, TAZs, mailing lists, and dirty hands. If you want to be part of this work, great. But please engage with it as it is. Bring your experience, your skills, your curiosity. But don’t dump disconnected theory on it. Don’t smother the flow with top-down frameworks or overthought abstractions.

We need people to join the flow of practice. Let the theory emerge where it’s needed, like compost, growing what feeds us. So: Start where your feet are. Build from what works. Trust the process of doing. And please, don’t push mess our way. We’ve got enough of that already.

Let’s build something real. Together.

#DIY #grassroots #4opens #KISS #deathcult #nothingnew

Why most radical tech is pointless, and why #indymediaback isn’t

Almost everything built in today’s alt-radical tech scene is, bluntly, pointless. Despite good intentions, most of it ends up feeding the endless cycle of #fashernista churn, flashy new platforms, bleeding-edge protocols, or encrypted communication tools nobody uses, built by isolated teams disconnected from real-world needs or history. This is the #geekproblem: a culture where novelty is fetishized, and social usefulness is an afterthought, if it appears at all.

Examples:

Secure scrolling tools: Every few months we see new chat apps, usually cryptographic fortresses with no communities. No one’s asking what these tools are for beyond vague abstractions like “privacy” or “freedom.” Tools without context.
Peer-to-peer silos: Projects like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) or many DAT spin-offs build entirely new social ecosystems that demand complete buy-in, rather than integrate into existing networks. What results is islands of lonely idealists yelling into empty timelines.
Protocol over people: Many Fediverse projects argue endlessly over specs like #ActivityPub or #Nostr, often prioritizing purity over pragmatism. What good is a protocol if no one actually uses it beyond a few devs congratulating themselves?

Why #indymediaback isn’t a pointless tech project, it offers something truly different. It is not “new.” It doesn’t pretend to invent a whole new ecosystem. It is an act of digital memory, a revival of the still-needed infrastructure that once helped build radical networks globally. #Indymedia worked. It published resistance. It distributed power. It was embedded in real communities and real movements. This is #nothingnew done right.

The #nothingnew approach mediates against the churn by reusing workflows, social trust, and existing cultural practices. It doesn’t ignore tech, it grounds tech. Examples:

#indymediaback uses simple publish-form-comment workflows, already familiar. No #AI, no #blockchain, no obscure identity layer. Just people posting and curating stories.

It connects to existing radical spaces: housing co-ops, street kitchens, climate camps—places where digital tools are needed right now, and where the point isn’t building a unicorn startup but having a place to publish the truth when the cops are lying again.

Why copying #dotcons isn’t enough, in the #fediverse we so far have replicate Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram — Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed. This is useful, to a point. But all code is ideology. Copying capitalist infrastructure dose smuggle in capitalist logic. Copying invites the #deathcult right back in through the side door.

indymediaback avoids this trap. It doesn’t replicate any#dotcons logic or UX patterns. It revives a publishing common that worked before Silicon Valley captured this path. And more importantly, it’s embedded in a set of radical social practices: the #PGA hallmarks, the #4opens, and the messy, beautiful legacy of grassroots movements who already knew how to organize.

The value of #indymediaback isn’t just in tech. It’s in trust-based social continuity, the hidden glue of any working movement. Without this, you don’t have a radical tech project. You have a ghost repo on GitHub. That’s the central point, without real community, without continuity, without trust, radical tech is a dead end.

This is the carrot and stick we need now. If you care about the #openweb as a human value network, not just a protocol playground, you have to build things people can use today, and that people want to use, not because it’s encrypted or federated, but because it serves a purpose they already have.

This is where the wider #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. It’s not another protocol war. It’s a shovel to compost the inhuman mess we’ve inherited. It’s a framework built with the #4opens, to grow digital commons that don’t depend on VC, control freaks, or fashion. It’s where we build bridges between radical tech projects, rather than isolate ourselves in yet another Git-based castle.

In short, it’s a path of people over product, process over platform. We don’t need more “solutions.” We need to stop being prats, pick up the tools we already have, and start rebuilding.

Food for thought, and action.

America was always violent -You likely just have not noticed

The thing most liberals forget is that Americans are a notoriously politically violent bunch. From the Boston Tea Party to armed labour uprisings, from the Black Panthers to white vigilantes, from state crackdowns to citizen riots – the American story has always been soaked in political violence, the “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, all that was deliberately erased, rewritten, smoothed over, sold back as Disney-branded rebellion or CNN documentary tragedy. Out of sight, out of mind, out of options. That was the bipartisan strategy from Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Obama. Not to resolve pressure, but to suppress it.

The return of reality, is what we’re seeing now, this isn’t some “unprecedented crisis.” It’s a return to form. It’s the American normal that elitists have been desperately trying to keep hidden under plastic for decades. The only thing that’s changed is this: There’s no longer any outlet for the pressure, no trusted media, no real opposition party, no economic ladder, no commons to gather in, just debt, anxiety, and screens.

What now shocks the political class isn’t the chaos, it’s that there’s no release valve except their own collapse. They’re not afraid of the people rising up, They’re afraid that the state will be held accountable, and lose.

We were at this moment before in the USA, when the new deal was a white flag, let’s go back for a moment, FDR’s “New Deal” wasn’t a gift, It was a surrender, after 50 years of exploitation by the robber barons and their cronies, the country was on the brink. Labour revolts, communist organizing, anarchist movements, real threats to the state, were everywhere. FDR was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. The New Deal was a bargain: “Here’s a little back. Don’t take the rest.” It worked, temporarily. But only because people still had leverage.

Now? Every President since has mostly just tried to keep the lid on, offering less and less in return, and weaponizing the “culture war” as a distraction. By the Clinton era, the deal was done.

Deregulate the economy.

Outsource everything.

Privatize everything else.

Turn politics into a spectacle.

Keep the pressure building—but never release it.

And now here we are, in a real mess, with a poisoned society from 40 years of #deathcult worship, the political class are now standing naked before the onrushing #climatechaos and social break down, stripped of their sacred robes.

Spiritual poison: stripped rituals, atomized families, forgotten connections.
Social poison: movements fractured, solidarities lost to infighting.
Civic poison: institutions hollowed out, education turned to obedience training.
Media poison: truth for sale, journalism devalued, platforms turned to weapons.
Cultural poison: every feeling a product, every hope a commodity, every act of care reduced to an app.

This should worry the #nastyfew who are propping up this political class. We, the people, are still numbed, distracted, transactioned, algorithmically isolated, so still we can barely even imagine a world otherwise. And still the pressure builds, the worst mistake they’ve made is believing they can just keep doing this, that there are no consequences, that people will always submit if fed enough Netflix, fentanyl, and Uber Eats.

But history doesn’t work that way, when a government wages war on its people… Eventually, it loses, not because the people are strong, but because the government is brittle. The lie of modern technocratic rule is that you can govern without trust, coerce without violence, suppress without blowback. That myth has shattered now, collapse is a trajectory, not a theory.

So what now? We need to rebuilding beyond collapse. This is where our work comes in. #OMN, #indymediaback, the #openweb they’re not just nice ideas, they’re survival infrastructures. We can’t wait for a revolution that will never be televised or appear in our algorithmic feeds. We can’t expect institutions to reform themselves. We need:

Public spaces without paywalls

Media systems without gatekeepers

Tech that serves people, not platforms

Governance that comes from below, not above

This isn’t just political, it’s existential. Either we rebuild from the rubble of this poisoned world, or we get buried beneath it.

The choice isn’t “radicalism” or “reform.”
It’s resistance or thoughtlessness.
Collapse or commons.

You decide.

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework: “Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.” Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed social groups.

Closed algorithms.

Closed hardware.

Closed governance.

And on the flip side, the things that should be protected, our intimate conversations, our location, our health data, are often wide open to surveillance capitalism and state control. What the current “common sense” dogma gets wrong? What is missing is the idea that mainstream tech culture, privacy absolutists, and many crypto/anarchist types:

Almost all good social power comes from OPEN.
Most social evils take root in CLOSED spaces.

When people organize together in the open, they create commons, accountability, and momentum. They make movements. When decisions are made behind closed doors, they breed conspiracy, hierarchy, abuse, and alienation.

It’s not just about what is open or closed, it’s about who controls the boundary, and what happens on each side. If we close everything… If we follow the logic of total lockdown, of defaulting to encryption, of mistrust-by-design… then what we’re left with is only the closed. This leads to a brutal truth, the powers that dominate in closed systems are rarely the good ones.
Secrecy benefits the powerful far more than the powerless. Always has.

So when we let the #openweb collapse and treat it as naive, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re giving up the last space where power might be accountable, where ideas might circulate freely, where we might build something together.

Examples: When openness was lost. Let’s talk about a real-world case of #Diaspora vs. #RSS. 15 years ago, Diaspora emerged with crypto-anarchist hype as the alternative to Facebook. It was secure, decentralized, and… mostly closed. It emphasized encryption and privacy, but lacked network effects, openness, and simple flows of information.

In the same era, we already had #RSS, a beautifully open, decentralized protocol. It powered blogs, podcasts, news aggregators, without permission or centralized control. But the “Young #fashionistas ” of the scene shouted down RSS as old, irrelevant, and too “open.” They wanted to start fresh, with new protocols, new silos, new power. They abandoned the working #openweb to build “secure” ghost towns.

Fast-forward a decade, and now we’re rebuilding in the Fediverse with RSS+ as #ActivityPub. The same functionality. The same ideals, just more code and more complexity. That 10-year gap is the damage caused by the #geekproblem, the failure to build with the past, and for real people.

So what is the #geekproblem? At root, it’s a worldview issue. A failure to think about human beings in real social contexts. Geeks (broadly speaking) assume:

People are adversaries or threats (thus: encrypt everything),
Centralization is evil, but decentralization is always pure (thus: build silos of one),
Social complexity can be reduced to elegant protocols (thus: design first, use later).
But technology isn’t neutral. It reflects ideologies. And if we don’t name those ideologies, they drive the project blindly.

A place to start is to map your ideology, want to understand how you think about openness vs. closedness? Start by reflecting on where you sit ideologically, not in labels, but in instincts. A quick sketch:

Conservatism: Assumes order, tradition, and authority are necessary. Values stability, hierarchy, and often privacy.

Liberalism: Believes in open society, individual freedom, transparency, and market-based solutions.

Anarchism: Rejects imposed authority, promotes mutual aid, horizontal structures, and often radical openness.

None of these are “right,” but understanding where you lean helps clarify why you walk, build or support certain tools. If you’re building tools for the #openweb, these questions matter:

Do you default to closed and secure, or open and messy?

Who do you trust with knowledge—individuals or communities?

Do you believe good things come from control, or emergence?

These are sociological questions, not just technical ones, maybe start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies. Where do we go from here? Let’s bring this back to the openweb and the projects we’re trying to build, like:

#OMN (Open Media Network)

#MakingHistory

#indymediaback

#Fediverse

#P2P tools (DAT, Nostr, SSB, etc.)

All of these projects struggle with the tension between openness and privacy, between usability and purity, between federation and anarchy. But if we start with clear values, and an honest reflection on the world we want to create, we can avoid the worst traps. Let’s say it plainly:

Not everything should be open. But if we close everything, we lose what’s worth protecting.

Let’s talk: What do you think should be closed? What must be kept open at all costs? What’s your ideological instinct, and how does it shape your view of the #openweb?

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That’s not a functioning economy, it’s not freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that engineers artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was often local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t just gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.

The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this ere “P2P news app” built on #dat Hypercore/Hyperswarm is exciting. Yes, it’s similar to Nostr in structure: distributed relays, client-side aggregation, unstoppable flow. But as with Nostr tech isn’t enough. We are social creatures. A usable system needs:

Clear use cases rooted in human relationships – not just tech possibilities.
User-facing front-ends that invite participation, not gate it.
Interoperability with existing protocols (ActivityPub, ATProto, etc.) to avoid siloing.
Bridges between architectures – e.g. client-server ↔ P2P – so that real-world adoption is gradual and survivable.

The good news, the wider #OMN project is already a sane path forward, with a #KISS hybrid path. The plan is in bridging #P2P and client-server as a way out of this. Something like:

A lightweight server bridge that serves data to client-server users (ActivityPub, fediverse, legacy web),

While simultaneously feeding a P2P mesh, with each peer storing and distributing redundant objects,

So that over time, client-server becomes the bootstrapping layer, and #P2P becomes the long-term archive + resistance layer.

“Data is just object flows – how the user gets the object is irrelevant technically.”

This is the kind of thinking that gets us out of the traps, by moving from protocols to people. This isn’t just about code, it’s about culture. The #geekproblem won’t be solved by more architecture diagrams, it needs movements that embrace imperfection and prioritizes social use, visible, working front-ends people can contribute to and understand, documentation and tooling that builds capacity in others, not silos around the brilliant few.

What next? For the devs:

Can the p2p-news-app codebase be modularized to plug into #OMN projects as a data backend, even in a basic way?

Can we bridge shared data objects across protocols (e.g. post metadata flows from P2P → ActivityPub), even if janky at first?

Can we prototype a simple but cross protocol usable frontend, the examples is the work on #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, that lets non-geeks see and touch the network they’re part of?

Yes, for the movement, keep things messy but moving. Avoid dead ends by always asking:

"How does this empower non-technical users to organize, document, and publish together?"

Keep the tech grounded in the social fabric, the activists, journalists, organisers, and rebels this is all meant to serve. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can help,” please step forward. There’s space in wider tech/social #OMN and #MakingHistory for everyone, coders, writers, designers, testers and storytellers.

Let’s build bridges, not silos, let’s build tools people can use, not just tools geeks can admire, let’s do this together.

Composting the EU Tech Mess: From #NLnet to #Eurostack

There’s an old rot in the heart of European tech policy – and it’s not just from the corporate lobbies. It’s also sprouting from the well-funded, #NGO-flavoured corners of what should have been grassroots. A contradiction that tells us everything we need to know about how broken the current #EU #mainstreaming crew and paths are.

Take #Eurostack for example, on paper, it looks decent: a collaborative push toward European digital sovereignty, resilience, and open-source infrastructure. The slogan is right, some of the tech might be right. But the people who will be driving it? And the people that will flood onboard to push it thought, that’s where it falls apart.

The same revolving-door #NGO actors, the same consultant-heavy think-tankers. The same polite funding circles that treat power as something to be managed, not challenged. These are not builders, these are managers of decline, politely sanding the edges off radical tech to make it presentable to policymakers, while completely ignoring the communities that could actually make it work.

And then we have #NLnet, which still has some grassroots soul left, but let’s be honest, the #geekproblem rears its head. Some of the funded projects are brilliant in technical terms but exist in complete social isolation. Beautiful protocol paths that no one will use. Decentralized stacks with zero real social onboarding. Tools solving problems that are themselves geek-invented, not in any sense real-world urgent.

So what do we get? Corporate-captured “open” projects that simply entrench the status quo, with a shine of progressive #PR (hello #Mozilla). Funded grassroots tech that is overengineered, fragile, and oblivious to social or political context it’s built for. Endless talk of “digital commons” by people who’ve never participated in one.

The result? More #techno-solutionist dead ends, more paper victories, more funding poured down the drain, to feed the empty abstracted versions of real solutions. And worse, a complete blind spot for why the #openweb is in crisis: it’s not a lack of good tech, it’s a lack of courageous, messy, trust-based social organising.

Too many of the actors at the table are blinded by the #deathcult of neoliberal governance. They don’t want alternatives – they want reforms that keep their seats at the table warm. This isn’t conspiracy talk. It’s about structural failure: the very people tasked with change have made comfort and compliance their operating system. That’s why the best thing we can do with this EU mess is compost it.

Let’s be clear: We’re not burning bridges with #NLnet or even #Eurostack. We’re building parallel paths with stronger roots, clearer intentions, and radical memory. We’re rebooting native projects like #indymediaback and the #OpenMediaNetwork not because the EU can’t help, but because it won’t, unless it’s dragged there by working alternatives. Until then, the #mainstreaming “solutions” paths will remain #PR for a status quo that’s rotting and failing with decay. Pastime for you to help to compost the lot, and grow better from the mulch.

https://unite.openworlds.info

Where’s the Resistance to Algorithmic Monopolies?

Trying to Remember: A Personal Reflection on Activist Histories and Memory Holes

Looking back on the activist groups I’ve been part of over the past few decades, I find myself drawn to the messy business of memory. Not nostalgia – something more grounded. A desire to trace the arc of what happened, why it happened, and what it meant, both personally and politically.

But here’s the thing, this is not easy. Many of the people I worked alongside have internalised completely different versions of events. They remember different catalysts, attribute failure or success differently, or – in some cases – choose to forget entirely. Writing about this, even with care, risks reopening bad wounds. It challenges people settled myths. It can feel unkind.

So the question nags: is it useful to try? The answer, I think, is yes. Painful, imperfect, but necessary. Because, as George Santayana reminds us: “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

And in our small corner of the world, radical media, grassroots tech, DIY networks, we repeat ourselves a lot. The cycle problem in media activism, is one of the most frustrating things, the endless circling of behaviour. We keep reinventing wheels, reliving the same dramas, walking into traps with our eyes wide open. Why? Because we don’t do history.

Or more precisely, we don’t keep our history. Our web resources disappear, servers shut down, backups get lost, important mailing lists become unreadable, whole communities vanish overnight, and the next wave thinks they’re starting from scratch. This amnesia isn’t accidental, it’s cultural. There’s an ingrained mentality among activists: “We invented this. This is new. We’re the first.” I’ve heard this too many times from people I know to be brilliant and thoughtful. It’s not arrogance, it’s isolation. A lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer.

And the result? Every new cycle repeats the last one’s mistakes, with slightly shinier tools and worse outcomes. Liberal histories are at the centre of this activist memory hole. Another reason to write this history down is that someone else will if we don’t, and when they are outside academics or #fashernistas they’ll get it wrong.

Here’s how it works, academics and #NGOs document movements, but only when they can draw from authoritative sources, often the institutions and individuals who have managed to embed themselves in respectable spaces. It’s safer for them to focus on official reports, named leaders, funded pilot projects, or case studies with neat, too often blinded, conclusions.

But grassroots work is messy by design, it’s often anonymous, decentralised, deliberately undocumented for safety and principle. When the official histories get written, they leave out the people who made the real changes happen. And worse, they reinforce liberal myths about how progress occurs: calm reason, funding applications, polite campaigns.

In truth, many of the most effective projects I’ve been part of were born in squats, kitchens, backrooms, stormy email threads, or chaotic hacklabs. They weren’t polished, they were alive. Take #Indymedia. I was there. I helped build and maintain some of it. I watched it rise, and fall. It was a revolution in online publishing and participatory journalism. It worked, until it didn’t. What killed it wasn’t just tech debt or burnout, it was a lack of historical grounding. We didn’t know how to document our process. We didn’t know how to pass on lessons. When things fractured, there was no record to return to, just fragments and gossip.

That’s part of why I started working on the #OMN (Open Media Network), and later the #indymediaback and #makeinghistory projects. These are attempts to not forget, to build infrastructure with memory baked in, and to do it in a way that resists co-option by the #NGO industrial complex or the liberal publishing gatekeepers. They are also efforts to balance individual and collective histories, to encode the process not just the outcomes, and to ground technology in shared political practice.

Should we document activist histories? Yes, because we keep losing what we built. Yes, because the next wave needs our shoulders to stand on, not just reinvent the same platforms with a shinier interface and worse governance. Yes, because remembering is a political act.

But we should do it with care, with plural narratives, not single heroes. We need archives that respect disagreement and dissonance. We need to document failure as much as success – not as shame, but as compost.

And we need to stop assuming the truth will speak for itself, it won’t, we have to speak it, even when it’s hard. Even when others remember it differently. This is not about gatekeeping. It’s about keeping gates open for others to come through.

If you were part of those times, I invite you to write your piece of it, even if it contradicts mine, especially if it does. If you weren’t, but you’re building now – take time to look back. Ask questions, find the old code, talk to the elders, search for the backups. Document your own work as you go, don’t let it vanish. History isn’t just past, it’s infrastructure. Let’s build some together.

Rise and Fall of Grassroots #OpenWeb

The #fashionistas are coming https://yewtu.be/embed/u_Lxkt50xOg? It’s time to become more real before this inflow swamps our “native” reboot, if we let them they will consume it and shit it out as more mess. To mediate this shit storm, it’s time to act, please, feel free to repost these web posts, thanks.

To understand where the #Fediverse and the #OpenSocialWeb are heading, and how not to lose our way, we need to reflect on where we’ve come from. The history of grassroots #openweb activism offers both inspiration and hard lessons.

Foundations are built by real people, social movements start local, they begin with people on the margins – those directly affected by injustice – taking action with the tools they have. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, tech projects like #Indymedia were the blueprint: decentralized, radically open, and run by volunteers who trusted each other and worked horizontally. It worked, for a while.

Today, projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #indymediaback, and #makeinghistory try to learn from that past. They aim to reboot media infrastructure and historical memory, powered by the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. We need to remember that this kind of work doesn’t scale by magic, it grows from grounded trust and native infrastructure, not from #VC injections or #NGO grants.

The trap of #NGO thinking is one of the biggest reasons grassroots projects fail, co-optation. When grassroots groups chase funding, they start shifting agendas to fit the funder’s priorities. Slowly, the mission gets neutralized. Culture changes, risk-taking of change and challenge vanishes, the projects to often become empty shells wearing yesterday’s slogans.

This has happened time and again, from later #Indymedia nodes to #EU-funded tech projects that are now more about kickbox reports than what any “user” wonts or the needed basic radical change. We can’t afford to go down this path again in the current #openweb reboot, the Fediverse.

We need Spiky/Fluffy balance, mutual aid that’s not just charity, but infrastructure. That’s where the #Fediverse shines: not just as an alternative platform, but as a parallel public space for organizing, sharing, and then resisting. It has to support both spiky (radical, disruptive) and fluffy (care-focused, relational) approaches.

On these paths, memory matters, projects like #makeinghistory remind us: if we don’t remember our wins and losses, we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes. Documenting not just content but working practice, how decisions were made, what trust looked like, what failed and why – is crucial. History is not just a mirror; it’s compost.

No monoculture, today, #Mastodon is becoming the monoculture of the Fediverse. It’s not evil. But it is dominating to the point of distortion. It’s following NGO-friendly paths and watering down the radical possibilities the #openweb offers. That’s a problem. We need more balance, more useful codebases, more governance experiments. This space is meant to be a garden, not a plantation.

Security isn’t paranoia, it’s culture, security on the #openweb isn’t about creating another bureaucratic nightmare of permissions and logins. It’s about cultural practices, trust, openness, moderation by consent, and keeping things simple. Most of all, it’s about not building what you don’t need, complexity is the enemy of security.

Final thought, to build real alternatives, we need to stop chasing virality and start building resilience. Less hype, more humility. Less “engagement,” more entanglement. And always, a ruthless focus on not becoming the thing we were trying to replace. Let’s not feed the mess. Let’s compost it and grow something better.

The problem of too big, Mastodon

I would start to say, with care, that #Mastodon is now heading in the wrong direction. Not because it’s inherently bad, or malicious, or “captured” in some conspiratorial sense. But because it’s become too dominant, tipping the scales far away from the diversity and messiness that a healthy #Fediverse needs.

This isn’t about blame, it’s about balance. To keep the #openweb alive and meaningful, we need to nurture other codebases, other, paths, cultures, and radically different governance paths alongside Mastodon’s dormant trajectory. Let’s acknowledge where Mastodon succeeded: It has been a gateway into the Fediverse, by mimicking Twitter, it provided a familiar experience that let mainstream users, journalists, #NGOs, and even some governments dip their toes into decentralization. It helped break the suffocating monopoly of Twitter/X. This was useful, necessary even. We needed a bridge.

But now? That bridge is being pushed/mistaken for the destination. And worse, it’s reinforcing the patterns we were trying to escape. Instead of blossoming into a diverse ecosystem and experimental tools, the #Fediverse is shaped by Mastodon’s design limitations and its pushing institutional gravity. That’s the problem, it’s not just a project any more, it’s becoming a bottleneck.

With #NGO-centric thinking shaping many of the newer Fediverse-adjacent events (like #NGI forums or EU funding discussions) which are now populated by the same #NGO/#dotcons crowd and comfortable liberal institutions that avoid risk, fear grassroots control, and domesticate the web for funding reports.

So, Mastodon isn’t “bad” and it played its part well. But its institutional path is now out of alignment with the nature of the Fediverse: the #4opens, radical transparency, permissionless innovation, and native grassroots culture. This is a poisoned balance, not because Mastodon is wrong, but because its gravitational pull is now preventing new paths from taking root.

What’s the alternative? Push for federation that supports collectives, not just individuals. Rebuild spaces for group publishing (like #Indymediaback) and shared authorship, not just influencer-following. Keep pushing the #4opens: Open data, open standards, open governance, open code – not just a logo and a code of conduct. Remember that a monoculture is always a point of vulnerability. Diversity isn’t optional, it’s the core strength of the #openweb.

So yes, Mastodon is a problem on balance, even as it was a solution before. But still, we don’t need to burn the bridge – but we do need to compost the monoculture and grow a thicker forest around it. Because decentralization means divergence, not convergence to one project’s roadmap #KISS

Trying to Remember: A Personal Reflection on Activist Histories and Memory Holes

Actors, Power, and Collective Publishing: Rethinking Fediverse Architecture for Grassroots Media

We recently had an extended and thoughtful discussion on signal between collaborators working on #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory, a key issue emerged: how should we structure “actors” (ActivityPub identities) in a network where the focus is collective action, not individual performance? This question isn’t just technical. It’s political, and central to the success or failure of rebooting radical grassroots media within the #Fediverse.

The tension is about balancing the individual and the collective. In most current Fediverse platforms (like Mastodon or PeerTube), each user is an “actor” with their own inbox/outbox, mirroring the logic of the mainstream #socialweb where identity and expression are deeply individual. But for platforms rooted in collective publishing, such as a revived #Indymedia, this doesn’t map neatly.

“We are trying to balance individualism with collectivism. People already have all the individualism they can take, we need a structure to support the collective.”

That means maybe moving away from assuming every account needs to be a visible, subscribable actor. Working model: Per-instance actors first, a consensus is emerging around per-instance actors – e.g., the Newswire and Features flows of a local Indymedia site act as the primary publishable entities in the Fediverse. These represent the editorial collective’s curated output – not just anyone shouting into the void.

External trusted contributors (like info@hamishcampbell) would publish content from their own Fediverse accounts using hashtags like #oxfordindymedia, which the local Indymedia instance detects, vets, and republishes.

This brings three key benefits:

Curation over chaos – Stories don’t just flood in via hashtags; they’re filtered through trust relationships.
Permissioned federation – Only trusted flows (or untrusted but manually reviewed ones) are accepted. Hashtag spam is naturally blocked.
Maintaining editorial identity – Subscribing to an Indymedia instance means subscribing to its judgement, not just raw firehose feeds.

Do we need per-user actors? Here’s where things get messy, and interesting. Three models were debated:

Classic Fediverse model: Each user has their own actor. This supports full transparency and traceability of actions, but risks returning to individualist norms and opens the door to abuse or platform drift.
Invisible user accounts: Users exist internally for moderation or curation roles, but aren’t visible in the Fediverse as actors.
Controlled per-user actors: Users do have actors, but these are only used to publish activity logs, not posts. Think: “Editor X approved story Y”, useful for building transparency and trust within an open process.

Option 3 sits nicely with the principles of the #4opens, particularly open process and open governance. It provides a transparent audit trail without pushing users into the spotlight.

UX vs backend architecture, what becomes clear is that the user experience should foreground collective flows – Features, Newswire, Tags – while any per-user mechanics operate in the background, supporting moderation, traceability, or edge-case publishing. Whether those background accounts are AP actors or not might depend on implementation details.

“It’s not about the actors per se — it’s about what shows up in the front-end UX, and how we build trust in the process.”

Final considerations, networks like #IndymediaBack default to collective-first publishing, with user actor functionality off unless needed. #MakingHistory, by contrast, might enable user actor publishing to support mass collaborative storytelling. Both platforms rely on whitelist federation, meaning only trusted instances and users can feed directly into the editorial stream. Abuse prevention comes not just from code, but from the politics of moderation, curation, and shared norms.

We probably need per-user actors, but used sparingly and carefully.
We definitely need per-instance actors for trusted collective outputs.
Hashtags are a start, but the flow must be curated and accountable.
UX should put collectives front and centre, with user identity in the background.
This is a political choice, not just a technical one, and that’s a good thing.

For more on how this fits into the broader reboot of radical media infrastructure, see:
Rebooting Radical Media (YouTube)
Programming: Open Media Network

Dev test work for Makinghistory application

Can bureaucracies join the #Fediverse? Yes – with WordPress + ActivityPub

Let’s stop pretending every institution has to “go social” by building new habits, communities, and platforms from scratch. We already have a solid, simple tool that can bridge them from the #dotcons into the #Fediverse: WordPress + the ActivityPub plugin.

Institutions want control – That’s OK. Bureaucratic institutions, local councils, unions, media orgs, #NGOs, aren’t designed for fast, messy social interaction. They won’t control over moderation, messaging, and timelines. That’s how they work, the good news is that they don’t have to surrender that control to leave the exploitative corporate platforms.

There is a path to step sideways into the #openweb by using tools they already trust, #WordPress, plugging into the #Fediverse with a few small adjustments. Here is how this works:

Use WordPress as a public publishing hub, it already supports articles, media, comments, and user permissions. It’s familiar to thousands of comms and IT staff.
Install the ActivityPub plugin. This lets every post become a Fediverse-native object. Readers on Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica etc. can follow and share the content.
Keep moderation tight. Comments from the Fediverse can be held for review by default. Content inflows are closed, moderated, or opened based on trust levels.
Build distribution without chasing followers. The content flows outward. Others can quote, reply, remix – but the source stays under local control.

The alternative? Indie News, if not WordPress, the more adventures could host a dedicated Fediverse news instance (like a rebooted #IndymediaBack) or even set up a microblogging server using software like WriteFreely or Plume. These would support long-form or short-form posts, stay focused on the institution’s goals, avoid chasing engagement metrics from #dotcons. And again, comments and responses could be moderated or disabled, depending on needs. No spam tsunami. No culture wars. Just distribution and visibility – on native #openweb terms.

Why this matters, many public institutions want to move away from Facebook and Twitter, but feel locked in. They know those platforms are toxic, yet all the people are there. But what if we stopped treating the #Fediverse like a chaotic free-for-all and started showing how it can also work for structured, “responsible” publishing? WordPress already has millions of users. The ActivityPub plugin is mature, maintained, and already working. All it takes is will, and a little guidance.

Benefits at a glance:

Maintain editorial control
Publish to a growing #openweb ecosystem
Avoid vendor lock-in and algorithmic censorship
Build real, direct relationships with communities
Help decentralize digital infrastructure for the public good

If an institution can run a blog, it can join the Fediverse. If it can post on Facebook, it can do better. Let’s stop waiting for perfect platforms and start using the tools we already have, WordPress is an underrated bridge from the bureaucratic world into a better, fairer, and more resilient #openweb path.

Why Doesn’t Every City Have a Fediverse Server?